Crossing the Shadow Lines: Essays on the Topicality of Amitav Ghosh’s Modern Classic edited by Esterino ADAMI, Carmen CONCILIO and Alessandro VESCOVI «QuadRi» Quaderni di RiCOGNIZIONI The scholarly essays which are gathered in this issue of “QuadRi. Quaderni di RiCognizioni” have been selected as a result of a call for papers among those presented at the International Conference on The Shadow Lines Thirty Years After, held at the University of Milan and the University of Turin on 12-13 November 2018. New contributions have also been added, due to the enormously rich and rewarding response. We thank the Italian Association for the Study of Cultures and Literatures in English (AISCLI www.aiscli.it) for sponsoring both the conference and the present publication, which is published thanks to the co-funding by Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere e Culture Moderne and the Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici dell’Università di Torino. Crossing the Shadow Lines: Essays on the Topicality of Amitav Ghosh’s Modern Classic. E. Adami, C. Concilio and A. Vescovi (eds), Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere e Culture Moderne, Università di Torino, Torino 2020 – ISBN 9788875901738. Cover image: Going Away and Coming Home, courtesy of Pikist.com Graphic project and editorial layout by Arun Maltese: Progetto grafico e impaginazione: Arun Maltese (www.bibliobear.com) «QuadRi» Quaderni di RiCOGNIZIONI XI 2020 I «QUADERNI DI RICOGNIZIONI» «QuadRi» – Quaderni di RiCOGNIZIONI è la collana curata dal Comitato scientifico e dalla Redazione di RiCOGNIZIONI. Rivista di lingue, letterature e culture moderne, edita online dal Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere e Culture Moderne dell’Università di Torino. La rivista e i suoi Quaderni nascono con l’intento di promuovere ri-cognizioni, sia trattando da prospettive diverse autori, movimenti, argomenti ampiamente dibattuti della cultura mondiale, sia ospitando interventi su questioni linguistiche e letterarie non ancora sufficientemente indagate. I Quaderni di RiCOGNIZIONI sono destinati ad accogliere in forma di volume i risultati di progetti di ricerca e gli atti di convegni e incontri di studio. ISSN: 2420-7969 COMITATO DI DIREZIONE Direttore responsabile • Paolo Bertinetti (Università di Torino); Direttore editoriale • Carla MARELLO (Università di Torino) COMITATO EDITORIALE Elisa CORINO (Università di Torino), Roberto MERLO (Università di Torino), Daniela NELVA (Università di Torino), Matteo REI (Università di Torino) COMITATO DI REDAZIONE Pierangela ADINOLFI (Università di Torino), Elisabetta BENIGNI (Università di Torino), María Felisa BERMEJO CALLEJA (Università di Torino), Silvano CALVETTO (Università di Torino), Gianluca COCI (Università di Torino), Massimo MAURIZIO (Università di Torino), Patricia KOTTELAT (Università di Torino), Enrico LUSSO (Università di Torino), Alessandra MOLINO (Università di Torino) COMITATO SCIENTIFICO Ioana BOTH (Universitatea «Babeş-Bolyai», Cluj-Napoca), Suranjan DAS (Università di Calcutta), Andrea CAROSSO (Università di Torino), Emanuele CICCARELLA (Università di Torino), Giancarlo DEPRETIS (Università di Torino), Thierry FONTENELLE (Translation Center for the Bodies of the European Union, Luxembourg), Natal’ja Ju. GRJAKALOVA («Puškinskij Dom», Accademia delle Scienze di San Pietroburgo), Salvador GUTIÉRREZ ORDÓÑEZ (Universidad de León), Philip HORNE (University College, London), Krystyna JAWORSKA (Università di Torino), Ada LONNI † (Università di Torino), Maria Grazia MARGARITO (Università di Torino), Fernando J.B. MARTINHO (Università di Lisbona), Francine MAZIÈRE (Université Paris 13), Riccardo MORELLO (Università di Torino), Francesco PANERO (Università di Torino), Virginia PULCINI (Università di Torino), Giovanni RONCO (Università di Torino), Michael RUNDELL (Lexicography MasterClass), Elmar SCHAFROTH (Universität Düsseldorf), Mikołaj SOKOŁOWSKI (Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk, Warszawa), Michelguglielmo TORRI (Università di Torino), Claudia Maria TRESSO (Università di Torino), Jorge URRUTIA (Universidad «Carlos III», Madrid), Inuhiko YOMOTA (Kyoto University of Art & Design), François ZABBAL (Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris) EDITORE Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere e Culture Moderne Palazzo delle Facoltà Umanistiche Via Sant’Ottavio, 20, Torino SITO WEB: http://www.dipartimentolingue.unito.it/ CONTATTI RiCOGNIZIONI. Rivista di lingue, letterature e culture moderne SITO WEB: http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ricognizioni/index E-MAIL: [email protected] Issn: 2384-8987 3%4 5 $ 6 7 6!!8 "$9@A B Crossing the Shadow Lines: Essays on the Topicality of Amitav Ghosh’s Modern Classic edited by Esterino ADAMI, Carmen CONCILIO and Alessandro VESCOVI DIPARTIMENTO DI UNIVERSITÀ LINGUE E LETTERATURE STRANIERE E DI TORINO CULTURE MODERNE The published contributions have been submitted to blind peer review. The editors are responsible for this procedure and testify to its validity. SIGNIFICANT GEOGRAPHIES IN THE SHADOW LINES* Francesca ORSINI ABSTRACT • Approaches to world literature often think through binaries of local/global, major/minor, provincial/cosmopolitan, taking them as given positions on a single world map. To an extent, this is true of Amitav Ghosh’s prize-winning essay “The testimony of my grandfather’s bookcase” (1998), which reflects on his grandfather’s collection of world literature books to think about the relationship between his grandfather’s provincial location in Calcutta and the world. Yet in The Shadow Lines Ghosh takes a much more complex and interesting approach to space, the world, perception and narration. In the novel’s complex narration, space, time, and self always appeared mirrored through other people, times, and spaces. Places also acquire reality and meaning only after they are first narrated and imagined, often several times, and before they are experienced directly. This is a stance that has deep existential but also epistemological implications that go beyond “simply” critiquing colonial and national border-making. This essay explores how (and which) spaces become “significant” in the novel, and how the novel’s approach to space can be productive for thinking about world literature. KEYWORDS • The Shadow Lines; World Literature; Literary Geographies. 1. Location In his 1998 essay “The Testimony of my Grandfather’s Bookcase” (1998), Amitav Ghosh reminisces on his grandfather’s (and later uncle’s) impressive library in Calcutta, a monumental collection of mostly non-English writers that strikes Ghosh as somewhat incongruent with its location and its owner. Apart from modern Bengali classics (Bankim Chandra, Sarat Chandra, Tagore, Bibhuti Bhushan, Bonophul and Syed Mustafa Ali), The rest were in English. But of these only a small proportion consisted of books that had been originally written in English. The others were translations from a number of other languages, most of them European: Russian had pride of place, followed by French, Italian, * This article is an output of the Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies project which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 670876. «QuadRi» – Quaderni di RiCOGNIZIONI, XI • 2020 172 Francesco ORSINI German and Danish. The great masterpieces of the 19th century were dutifully represented: the novels of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev, of Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Stendhal, Maupassant and others. But these were the dustiest books of all, placed on shelves that were lofty but remote. (Ghosh 1998: no page number) The prominently displayed books “were an oddly disparate lot – or so they seem today”, he continues. Beside modernist classics like James Joyce, or William Faulkner “that can still be seen on bookshelves everywhere”, many others like Marie Corelli, Grazia Deledda or Knut Hamsun “have long since been forgotten”: Other names from those shelves have become, in this age of resurgent capitalism, symbols of a certain kind of embarrassment or unease – the social realists for example. But on my uncle’s shelves they stood tall and proud, Russians and Americans alike: Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Sholokov, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair. There were many others too, whose places next to each other seem hard to account for at first glance: Sienkiewicz (of Quo Vadis), Maurice Maeterlinck, Bergson. Recently, looking through the mildewed remnants of those shelves I came upon what must have been the last addition to that collection. It was Ivo Andric’s Bridge on the Drina, published in the sixties. (Ghosh 1998, emphases added)1 That most of the twentieth-century foreign non-Anglophone authors are Nobel prize winners suggests to Ghosh that the globalisation of literature is an older phenomenon than we usually assume, dating from the early ’900s and not the 1990s. But it also reflects the provincial asymmetry and dependence of knowledge typical of the colonial subject, who learns about modern Italian and Swedish writers while Italian or Swedish readers remain likely ignorant about contemporary Indian writers (save of course Rabindranath Tagore).2 The essay goes on to contrast the monumentality of world literature on the bookshelf with his uncle’s inconsequential life. This uncle never travelled and his broad-ranging library appears like a form of vicarious travel, a provincial’s dream of membership in the world republic of letters from a peripheral location. (In the end, he even stops reading and switches to